Brooklyn’s Musical Matrix

The Dessners’ Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Festival at BAM

In their Crossing Brooklyn Ferry festival, Aaron, left and Bryce Dessner give the Brooklyn Academy a borough flavor, starting Thursday.Credit
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

About two years ago, when Bryce and Aaron Dessner began considering which acts to book for Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the music festival they put together for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, they knew they wanted to represent the local scene. The Dessners, twin musicians who are part of the indie band the National, also realized that this was an impossible undertaking.

“We’re looking at this community of musicians that have decided to call Brooklyn their home, which is a pretty wide range,” Bryce said. “There’s so much different music happening. We tried to involve things we liked, and it’s still just a fraction of what’s out there.” The festival is not a full retrospective, he added, but “a snapshot of certain corners of Brooklyn.”

Named for the poem in Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” the festival, which runs Thursday to Saturday, includes established indie rockers like the Walkmen and St. Vincent; performers on the verge, like the singer-songwriter Sharon Van Etten; and lesser-known classical and avant-garde musicians like Hubble and the yMusic. It also includes a film program, with shorts by musicians like Tunde Adebimpe of TV on the Radio, the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Unexpected pairings were part of the Dessners’ vision, in line with the mission of the academy. Its director, Joseph V. Melillo, commissioned the festival after he began uncovering the breadth of the borough’s indie universe with Sufjan Stevens’s multimedia symphony “The BQE” in 2007 and “Long Count” in 2009, a song cycle by the Dessners and Matthew Ritchie. But the brothers also quickly reached out to friends and label mates.

Of booking Annie Clark, who performs as St. Vincent, Bryce said, “I called her, I bought her dinner and I was like, ‘You are going to do this.’ ” Well-known artists referred others; the brothers hoped to give young acts the kind of boost they had received. “There’s always the helping hand,” Aaron said, “whether it’s playing on people’s records or giving them studio space or making suggestions about the business side.”

In an interview in Aaron’s backyard in Ditmas Park, the Dessners spoke glowingly of their creative circle. “People are really generous,” Aaron said. “You get the sense that everyone’s rooting for each other.”

The festival may not be the whole galaxy of Brooklyn music, but it is at least a solar system, a range of performers often in one another’s orbits. The Dessners serve as a big star, but they’re not alone; others have their circles too. “Everyone is definitely connected somehow,” Aaron said. Here, visually, is a sample of the constellation of Brooklyn music.

Correction: May 3, 2012

An earlier version of a photo caption that ran with this article misidentified Aaron and Bryce Dessner.